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Unread 12-18-2017, 12:28 PM
Gregory Dowling Gregory Dowling is offline
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Location: Venice, Italy
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Glad to hear that you've been prompted to explore Chesterton, Michael. Of course, the problem is that he did write too much and sometimes he wrote too quickly. Probably best to try well-chosen selections of his works.

In any case, with regard to your quotation from Orthodoxy, it's worth pointing out that Chesterton would never attack reason itself. It's worth remembering the conclusion of the first Father Brown story, after the priest has unmasked the master-thief, Flambeau, who has been passing himself off as a priest:
Quote:
"...But another part of my trade, too, made me sure you weren’t a priest.”
“What?” asked the thief, almost gaping.
“You attacked reason,” said Father Brown. “It’s bad theology.”
And Chesterton agreed entirely with Susan about poets, that they don't produce good poetry when mentally ill. In that same part of Orthodoxy, he writes:

Quote:
Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health. He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin.
And he adds, "Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets."
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